What if the President of the United States made a speech, but a tree didn't fall in the woods where nobody was around to hear it? The obvious answer is the press and the leftwingnuts would still applaud, whether there was any actual content or not. And so far, I have yet to hear any of the multitudinous blather of Obama that had any content whatsoever. "Blah, blah, blah...Bush did it!"
President Obama on Thursday vigorously defended his decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention site but said some terrorist suspects would be held indefinitely, setting up the prospect of a painstaking fight with Congress over relocating detainees to the United States and disappointing supporters critical of what they saw as a concession to Bush-era policies.
The announcement came midway through a 50-minute address, which kicked off a highly public and impassioned debate between Mr. Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney over how far the government should go to defend itself from terrorism - a back and forth that transfixed Washington and much of the nation...
But it was the give and take with Mr. Cheney that made the day memorable and historically significant.
Mr. Cheney's speech at the institute had been scheduled for a few weeks, and it appeared that the White House intentionally scheduled Mr. Obama's speech so that it fell right before the former vice president's. The White House has already in its four months handpicked conservative figures with low popularity ratings or who are repellent to moderates, such as radio-show host Rush Limbaugh, as foils for them to fight against publicly.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said "there was an awareness that [Mr. Cheney] was speaking, but the speech wasn't scheduled because he was speaking on a certain day."
And while I'm writing about irrelevant idiots in high office, if you thought that doofus who was briefly press secretary for President Bush (whathisname who wrote the book) was the most clueless White House press flack in history, Robert Gibbs is one-upping him spectacularly. Gibbs is such a doofus, even the liberal-leftwing press (pardon my repetition) is making jokes about him.
Take a wild guess what the most-read post on my blog is during its short history?Dick Cheney is reminding Republicans that they need to defend themselves when attacked.
When President Obama released the Justice Department interrogation memos a month ago, Cheney denounced him for doing so. He explained why it was inappropriate and unwise to release such documents. But he did more. He didn't just defend himself and the administration in which he served. He fought back, and encouraged others to do so.
He challenged the president to release CIA memos evaluating the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques. He raised the question of whether congressional Democrats--Nancy Pelosi, for one--had known of, and at least tacitly approved of, the allegedly horrifying abuses of the allegedly lawless Bush administration.
Now, a month later, Pelosi is attacking career CIA officials for lying to Congress, and other Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from her. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has pulled back on threats to prosecute Bush-era lawyers, reversed itself on releasing photos of alleged military abuse of prisoners, and embraced the use of military commissions to try captured terrorists. The administration now looks irresponsible when it lives up to candidate Obama's rhetoric, and hypocritical when it vindicates Bush policies the candidate attacked.
Thank God for Dick Cheney. Along with Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, these three are taking a stand against the lunatic left and finally the Republicans in office are joining the fight.
House Minority Leader John Boehner steps up to the plate and joins the battle at long last.
Over at the Washington Post's Post Partisan blog, Kristol writes:
As Emanual has already been quoted as saying about the power grab during the economic crisis, never let a good crisis go to waste. It sure looks like he's using the Pelosi torture crisis to get rid of the Speaker of the House and orchestrate the elevation of someone of his own choosing.Commentators have been struck -- though not perhaps as much as they should have been -- by the extraordinary character of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s blunt and stark rebuke of Nancy Pelosi. Responding to political debates that “reached a new decibel level [Thursday] when the CIA was accused [by Pelosi] of misleading Congress,” Panetta wrote Friday that “our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.”
But did Panetta simply decide on his own to send this letter? It’s almost inconceivable. Panetta is a former member of Congress and a former White House chief of staff. President Obama made him CIA director only four months ago. Even if his motivation for the letter was in part driven by an institutional imperative to defend his agency, Panetta would have understood the political implications of humiliating a House speaker of his own party. He surely at least ran the letter by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to get clearance. It’s also possible that Panetta was encouraged to send the letter by Emanuel.
Joe Biden ought to rode out of town on the same rail with Nancy Pelosi. God help our nation.According to an account in Newsweek, Biden did give up one of the country's secrets at another dinner where journalists and politicians make fun of Republicans (and occasionally laugh at each other). Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the Vice President's Residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Eleanor Clift writes:Ever wonder about that secure, undisclosed location where Dick Cheney secreted himself after the 9/11 attacks? Joe Biden reveals the bunker-like room is at the Naval Observatory in Washington, where Cheney lived for eight years and which is now home to Biden. The veep related the story to his head-table dinner mates when he filled in for President Obama at the Gridiron Club earlier this year. He said the young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment. The officer explained that when Cheney was in lock down, this was where his most trusted aides were stationed, an image that Biden conveyed in a way that suggested we shouldn’t be surprised that the policies that emerged were off the wall.Despite more than fifteen trips to the VPR over the past five years, and despite having conducted dozens of interviews about security precautions taken for Cheney and his staff after 9/11, I was never told such a bunker existed.
I was able to learn and write about Cheney's getaways at Camp David, extra measures taken for him when he traveled on Air Force Two, and even the use of a "dummy" plane sometimes used in combat zones. But no one ever mentioned this secure facility at the Naval Observatory.
The obvious conclusion: Its existence was highly classified.
So what was Joe Biden doing talking about it at the Gridiron Dinner? And, if it was indeed classified, will this disclosure be referred to the Justice Department?
In the spirit of Monty Python, it’s time for something totally different. As a break from politics, let’s go fishing on the Snake River in Wyoming. With Dick Cheney. Now wait a minute, really this is not about politics, even though Vice President Cheney has the rare distinction of being hated even worse than President Bush by the loony left, the mainstream media and the Democrats (same, same). It seems that the much-maligned Cheney, variously referred to by his critics as BeelzeDick, Darth Vader and other less flattering names, can be Mr. Nice Guy when he leaves the political battlefields and goes home to Wyoming for his favorite pastime, fly fishing.
That’s what Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard reports after going fly fishing with Cheney on the South Fork of the Snake River, in a cover story titled The Passion of Dick Cheney.
Jackson, Wyoming
At the risk of being publicly ridiculed, quarantined, or stoned, I'll just say it straightaway: I really like Dick Cheney. Don't get me wrong, I feel sick about it… But Cheney is also known as a fisherman, and I am a fishing slut with little or no moral center.
Labash writes that a year ago, he first met Cheney at a book party in Washington and had a long, serious chat about fly fishing. But his requests to actually go on a fishing trip with the man the Secret Service calls “The Angler” were denied until a year later, when he unexpectedly got an invitation to come to Wyoming. He brought along his tape recorder to make it a working trip, but admits he didn’t expect to get much talk out of the reportedly close-lipped VP. But Cheney surprised him as soon as they got in the boat by saying:
"You know the only reason I agreed to this? I wanted to see what kind of reporter had the cojones to convince his editors to pay for him to come fish the South Fork."
Our guide, Pat Kelly, shoves us off into the chop, and despite all the forewarnings of sacrosanct Cheney silence on the river, he keeps up a steady patter over the next eight hours. He inquires about my kids and asks Kelly about his offseason employment. He tells me what he likes to read (Fly Fisherman, Gray's Sporting Journal, the Economist, raw intelligence), as well as what he doesn't (the blogs). "I don't blog," he says, as if clearing up a misconception. In April, though, the blogosphere was obsessed over a photo of Cheney fishing on the Snake. Many held that a reflection in Cheney's sunglasses revealed not a hand casting a flyrod, but a naked woman. When I ask Cheney about it, he breaks into a trouble-making grin. "I had a great guide that day."
If you were expecting Cheney to reveal the truth about the famous “naked woman” story, sorry, that’s all you get on that. But Labash’s report on the fishing trip may well be the most revealing interview ever done on Cheney. Even if you don’t fish, it’s well worth the reading time. And if you don’t mind me spoiling the ending, the score on the day of catching and releasing was Cheney 20, Labash 2.
Cheney takes his fly fishing just as seriously as his politics. When he’s gone, we may well miss his adult supervision in Washington.
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